It’s been two years since a task force recommended a slate of affordable housing policies to the City of Pittsburgh. While many of those are now in the works, 90.5 WESA’s Margaret J. Krauss reports one community group has been working on its own, neighborhood-level idea.

Rodney McCoy has lived on Hillcrest Street, across from three vacant lots, since 2000. After putting away the weed whacker he uses to clip his grass, he said Garfield has changed a lot.

The Pittsburgh Planning Commission voted to approve a preliminary land development plan to build office and retail space at the former Penn Plaza site in East Liberty, which is owned by LG Realty Advisors.

Commissioners approved the plan on Tuesday, after nearly five hours of deliberation and public comment from close to 40 speakers, the majority of whom opposed the project. They used their allotted three minutes to call for affordable housing and to critique the community outreach process.

Advocates are urging the City of Pittsburgh to take the former Penn Plaza site through eminent domain.

Randall Taylor and Jessica McPherson volunteer with Penn Plaza Support and Action, an advocacy group fighting to rebuild affordable housing at the site of the former Penn Plaza Apartments in East Liberty.

On the tails of the 4th annual P4 conference, Mayor Bill Peduto on Friday unveiled details of a fund called OnePGH, that will finance eight goals related to making the city a more equitable, sustainable place by 2030.

The possibility that Amazon might come to Pittsburgh has led to soul-searching about who would benefit. 90.5 WESA’s Margaret J. Krauss and Chris Potter report tension was on display this week at a conference where Mayor Bill Peduto sketched out a plan to prepare for rapid growth.

People trickled into the Spirit of Pittsburgh ballroom at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center Wednesday night for the opening of the city’s annual meeting on P4, a decision-making framework that prioritizes people, place, planet and performance to ensure development is equitable and sustainable.

At a charged public meeting Monday night, residents decried a plan to build retail and office space at the former Penn Plaza site in East Liberty, once home to more than 200 low-income and elderly people.

The Fair Housing Act passed 50 years ago Wednesday as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

Lawmakers enacted the legislation just one week after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. as riots flared in Pittsburgh and other cities. It was intended to protect buyers and renters from discrimination based on race, color, disability, religion, sex, familial status or national origin.

The rate of Pittsburgh renters facing eviction judgments is lower than state and national averages, according to new data analysis by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. But many displaced tenants never make it to the courtroom.

Developers of the former Penn Plaza site in East Liberty made their first presentation Tuesday to the Pittsburgh Planning Commission since that body rejected its development plan more than a year ago. That deal included a mixed-use development anchored by a Whole Foods, which has since pulled out.

Over the course of 2017, the long-discussed development of a 28-acre parcel in the Lower Hill District moved one step closer to realization.

After months of negotiation, the Penguins organization—which holds exclusive development rights to the land—the city, Urban Redevelopment Authority and the Pittsburgh-Allegheny County Sports and Exhibition Authority agreed to new development terms in December.

Just how long the site has been on its way to shovels in the ground is measured best in decades rather than years.

The board of Pittsburgh’s Urban Redevelopment Authority has adopted a tenant protection policy, as part of the city larger efforts to safeguard and preserve affordable housing.

The URA’s tenant protection policy creates three additional responsibilities for landlords before they can end tenants’ leases: it gives tenants more time to move out, requires relocation assistance if multiple leases are being terminated, and requires landlords to notify local government of evictions.

More notice is always better, said Tom Cummings, director of housing for the URA.

As Gary Cirrincione walks along the Penn Avenue business corridor on the border Garfield and Bloomfield, he gestures towards the buildings on either side of the street.

"You've got a mix of commercial and residential spaces, all jumbled together here," said Cirrincione. "Urban areas need that sort of mix and dynamic. There's a diversity here."

When Cirrincione first moved to Hays Street in the East End, his home was in Garfield. Now, the same house is part of East Liberty due to a boundary change, but he doesn’t pay much attention to those technicalities anyway.

Some of the communities experiencing the most rapid changes in Pennsylvania are those that abut colleges and universities.

State College, for instance, has boomed in recent years largely due to the growing influence of Pennsylvania State University’s Main Campus. In general, this development has been positive for surrounding Center County, where there’s been a 10 percent rise in median household income since 2009.

But this growth hasn’t necessarily been a tide that’s lifted all boats, leaving fewer options for affordable housing in the area.

Affordable housing advocates say they’re concerned the consent agreement reached by the city of Pittsburgh and four neighborhood groups about the former Penn Plaza development site won’t actually help those who need it.

Over the next three to five years, more than 200 affordably priced apartments and homes could be built in East Liberty and Garfield as a result of the negotiations surrounding the demolition of Penn Plaza, according to Rick Swartz, executive director of the Bloomfield Garfield Corporation.